Quick preface: I went into this rabbit hole expecting to spend a lazy Sunday crunching a few on-chain charts. That was two and a half weeks ago. I now have a spreadsheet with 14 tabs, three half-finished Telegram chats with developers who haven’t slept, and an unhealthy amount of cold brew in my system. The punchline: ADA wallets holding 1–10M coins just notched their largest single-week accumulation since November 2022, right as the token jumped 26%. The last time I saw that pairing, we were on the runway to $3.
Wait, 67 million ADA in five days—did I read that right?
Yep. According to Santiment’s ‘Top Balances’ dashboard (screenshot here for posterity), the wallets that many of us casually call sharks gobbled up roughly 67 million ADA between March 4 and March 9. At current prices—hovering around $0.74 as I’m typing this—that’s a cool $49.5 million.
I’m not entirely sure what triggered the frenzy. My best guess is a mash-up of three things:
- A mini-narrative around Cardano’s partner-side chain, Midnight, which finally pushed its devnet repo into public view on GitHub.
- The Ethereum ETF drama pulling trader attention away from ETH/BTC and toward cheaper Layer-1 bets.
- Plain old FOMO. ADA had been lagging the SOL and AVAX rallies, and when a laggard pops, it pops hard.
Here’s what the raw price data looks like
Daily chart, March 1–March 10:
- Open March 1: $0.59
- High March 10: $0.75
- Seven-day ROI: right around +26.3%
The bigger takeaway is the structure: ADA poked its head above the 200-day EMA for the first time since late December and—this part caught my eye—did it on rising OBV (On-Balance Volume). That tells me people are buying breakouts instead of selling into them, which feels markedly different from the chop we saw all Q4.
I called a friend at IntoTheBlock to sanity-check the whale data
He pulled me a fresh distro of address cohorts. Quick summary:
Addresses with 10M–100M ADA increased their holdings by 0.48% of the circulating supply in the last 30 days. That’s roughly 170 million ADA, or about $125 million.
That cohort holds 11.2% of all ADA right now—up from 10.7% a month ago. In other words, the big fish are demonstrably net buyers. Retail, meanwhile, sold a combined 30 million ADA (sub-100k wallets) over the same stretch. If you enjoy contrarian signals, write that down.
The $1 question—literally
I keep staring at the weekly chart because that’s where the ghosts of $1 resistance live. ADA hasn’t closed a week above that psych level since April 2022. From a pure technical standpoint, the final hurdles are:
- Horizontal supply at $0.82–$0.85 (February wick)
- Macro down-trend line that started the week of September 6, 2021—currently sitting near $0.93
- The big, round, meme-worthy $1.00
Break all three on convincing volume, and you’ll suddenly hear YouTubers dusting off their old ‘ADA to $5’ thumbnails.
A quick detour: why whales might be buying
Okay, tangent time. I’ve been following Charles Hoskinson’s somewhat chaotic 2024 roadmap tweets. He loves buzzwords (who doesn’t?), but two real catalysts keep returning:
- Basho scaling upgrade. The Hydra heads are finally poking out in open-source repos, and one dev told me we could see live micro-transactions before July. If that’s more than hype, Cardano’s TPS could rival the Solana cluster.
- Interoperability via Midnight & Milkomeda. The Ethereum side-chain idea isn’t new, yet Milkomeda just passed 15k daily active addresses, per DefiLlama. That’s small potatoes next to ETH, but meaningful for an ecosystem once mocked for ‘no dApps’.
Translate those narratives into whale logic: a) higher throughput means cheaper fees, b) cross-chain bridges invite fresh liquidity, and c) ADA is still 75% off its ATH. Risk-reward looks asymmetric.
My personal vibe check (and the part I could be wrong about)
I’ll be honest: I got burned buying the Alonzo smart-contract hype in 2021. So I’m a little gun-shy. But the data is the data. And right now, the data says large wallets are quietly front-running something.
Could it be a buy-the-rumor situation ahead of Basho? Maybe. Could it just be whales cycling profits from memecoins into a safer alt? Also maybe. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’m not entirely sure ADA will clear $1 on the first try. But if it chops around $0.80-$0.85 and the accumulation trend doesn’t reverse, I’ll probably add to my own bag.
Why this matters for your portfolio (and mine)
Even if you’re not a Cardano maxi, monitoring layer-1 rotations helps you front-run broader alt cycles. Historically, ADA wakes up after ETH and SOL but before the lower cap L1s. If ADA punches past $1, the next domino could be Algorand or Near. That’s how 2021 played out, at least.
A reminder, though: ADA’s float is gigantic—35 billion tokens circulating. It needs significant demand to sustain explosive moves. So if you’re trading rather than stacking, watch the volume profile on exchanges like Binance and Upbit; when Korean flow dries up, rallies often stall.
Random” but relevant—OpenAI’s Sora cameos?
I can’t help slipping this in. The day ADA broke $0.70, my Twitter feed was flooded with AI-generated Sora clips of sci-fi cityscapes tagged #BuiltOnCardano. None of them were actually built on Cardano, of course, but the memetic cross-pollination between AI and altcoins feels bullish. During the 2017 cycle, the synergy was crypto + ICO + VR. This time it might be crypto + AI + restaking. ADA’s storytelling engine suddenly has fresh ammunition.
So, what could derail the breakout?
- SEC crosshairs. Remember when ADA was a named security in the Binance lawsuit footnotes last year? That risk hasn’t vanished.
- Hydra delays. If TPS upgrades slip to Q3 or Q4, traders’ patience might run out. Cardano’s ‘slow and steady’ culture is a double-edged sword.
- BTC dominance spike. If Bitcoin rips to $80k on ETF inflows, alts usually cool off. Keep one lazy eye on the BTC.D chart.
I cornered a DEX dev for a closing quote
Whale accumulation is cool, but what gets me excited is that we’re now signing 2,000 Plutus V2 transactions a day. That’s up 4× since Christmas. Apps are finally catching up to the theory. — @GridLoader, lead dev at Minswap
That squares with DeFiLlama’s TVL stats: Cardano DeFi locked value is $430 million, tripling since October. Still tiny compared to Ethereum’s $55 billion, but directionally encouraging.
My own next step—setting alert bots
I’ve queued alerts at $0.83 and $0.94. If ADA pushes through and retests those levels as support, I’ll size into a swing trade with a $1.18 target (Fib extension) and a stop under the 50-day EMA.
If you’re a longer-term holder, consider using partial DCA tranches. Whale footprints usually leave trails, but nobody knows when they’ll flip distribution. And remember: Your thesis should outlive any single tweet—mine included.
Bottom line: Cardano’s whales are buying, the charts finally look constructively ugly (in a good way), and a clean weekly close above $0.85 could be the spark. Whether that leads to a euphoric sprint to $1—or yet another soul-crushing rejection—depends on both macro and Cardano’s ability to ship. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and maybe keep a little dry powder just in case.
—End of long rant. Ping me on X if you spot fresh data I missed. I’m always game for a healthy debate.
